[TriLUG] Digital Cameras

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Joel Ebel wrote:

> The S410 and S500 are the best when it comes to compactness.  These 
> cameras are the size of a deck of cards.  And for their size they take 
> excellent pictures.  Aaron Joyner can comment on them, since he's got 
> an S400.

And boy do I love my S400.  I take it with my everywhere, it is almost 
always on my person (when the Wife hasn't kidnapped it - I need to get 
her one of her own).  I had always heard good things about the Canon 
Digital Elph series (of which the S400 is one example), and I am glad to 
say they live up to the hype.  It's extremely small, takes wonderful 4 
mega pixel pictures, has beautiful color reproduction, and consistently 
makes me happy.  The user interface is very nice and intuitive, the 
battery life is quite reasonable (I've never needed more than 2 
batteries worth of shots on one outing).  My one complaint would be that 
there's no battery life indicator to let you know how long you've got 
left on the battery in the camera - but that's a small and forgivable 
sin.  There is a warning light that comes on right when it's about to 
die.  But when it takes pictures like this, how can you complain?
http://pics.joyner.ws/album03/IMG_0171

Taken on my honeymoon, as a quick snapshot, and it looks better than the 
post cards we have from the same location.  I took it from the back of a 
very-briefly-stopped tram.

> Like I said though, I'm brand loyal.  I like how Canon does things 
> with cameras.  You can also consider Nikon, Sony, or Olympus, though I 
> think they've recently had some trouble keeping up.  Maybe even Fuji, 
> but I'm not a big fan of their technology.  I recommend staying away 
> from most everything else.  Almost everyone I know has purchased a 
> Canon and loves it.

I to have this brand-loyalty affliction for Canon.  My father has a 
similar problem, but he's attached to Sony.  He loves his Sony camera, 
and opines that the image quality is as good or better, and he prefers 
the features.  His particular camera is significantly larger than my 
Canon, with a 10x zoom and much better feature-accessibility.  My mother 
got a Sony similar to my S400 for Christmas, and it looked quite nice, 
and has a significantly larger LCD (3.5 inches - takes up the entire 
back of the camera).  Unfortunately, I think the LCD will destroy her 
battery life (it uses AAs - which compounds the problem), so her over 
all experience of the camera won't be as nice as my Canon.  But in 
general, the camera certainly takes nice pictures and is serviceable.

A lot of it comes down to what type of camera you want.  Larger, better 
feature accessibility (the features are there on the smaller cameras, 
they're just harder to take advantage of due to things like having to go 
into a feature menu), better zoom.  Smaller, more portability, less zoom 
and the aforementioned feature-accessibility trade-off.

Best of luck,
Aaron S. Joyner